10 Branding Lessons That Every Business Graduate Should Know (But Doesnt)

1079

10 Ways To Increase The ROI Of Your Thank You Page

896

29 Companies Tell You How To Rock Social Media

892

79 Link Building Resources for 2012

860

What Customers Want in an eCommerce Site

834

3 Obvious but Overlooked Elements to Test on Your Landing Pages Right Now!

Those are some pretty impressive share counts!

Let’s look for trends (I looked at the top 50 to find these, but the top 10 really exemplify them).

8/10 use a number in the headline (6 of which start with the number)

4/10 Tell you you're “doing it wrong”

8/10 directly promise information on how to do something (or how not to), and the remaining 2 imply it.

OK, so let’s see how this compares to the Tournament I ran on headlines for this very blog!

Whicher Score

Headline

138

Case Study: 12 Pricing Plans Ranked

137

The 7 Deadly sins of A/B Testing

124

Top 5 Programming Languages for New Projects

117

What is Tournament Testing & Why do I care?

104

How to Write Effective Survey Questions

93

When A/B Testing Fails

90

3 Headline writing Strategies you need to know yesterday

81

Hacker News voting: Flawed from the Start?

80

The Most Hated Companies in America

35

The 3 Most Desired Gifts this Christmas

The trends roughly match what we discovered above, but there are a couple things worth digging into.

First off, “3 Most Desired Gifts” follows the “use a number” tip, but it’s a massive FAIL on the other 2 points, as well as the litmus test. The info isn’t actionable, and it’s not on a topic interesting to my audience at all.

It also doesn’t strike you as likely to be fresh content (I’d give it a 90% chance of having 2 apple products in the list).

And the whicher score reflects that. (100 is always the average score, so this is very, very low).

Also notice that all of the top 5 headlines pass the litmus test with flying colors.

On the other hand, none of the top 5 are HUGE winners (I’d like to see scores above 150), which means one of 2 things:

The headlines are all good so the winners aren’t much better than the losers

I haven’t come up with a big winner yet.

I’m betting on the later

With this data in hand, I think I’ll see a boost in search traffic on my future content marketing efforts :)

If you want to rank your headline ideas, the Whicher is a powerful ranking tool!